Benefits of Using Public Clouds

What are Major Benefits of Using Public Clouds?

Public Clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide computing resources and services that you can use to build applications within minutes on a pay-as-you-go pricing basis. For example, you can rent a server on AWS that you can connect to, configure, secure, and run just as you would a physical server. The difference is the virtual server runs on top of a global-scale network managed by AWS.

You pay for your virtual server only while it runs—i.e., no lock-in required, with no up-front purchase costs or ongoing maintenance costs. Backed by the AWS network, your virtual server can do things no physical server can, such as automatically scaling into multiple servers when demand for your application increases.

Using AWS to build your Internet application is like purchasing electricity from a power company instead of running your own generator, and it provides many of the same benefits: capacity exactly matches your need, you pay only for what you use, economies of scale result in lower costs, and the service is provided by a vendor experienced in running large-scale networks. In addition, AWS can offer significant cost savings, up to 80%, compared to the equivalent on-premises deployments.

LOW ONGOING COST

Cloud computing helps you reduce your overall IT costs in multiple ways. Our massive economies of scale and efficiency improvements allow us to lower prices continually, and our multiple pricing models allow you to optimize costs for both variable and stable workloads. Additionally, Cloud computing drives down up-front and on-going IT labor costs and gives you access to a highly distributed, full-featured platform at a fraction of the cost of traditional infrastructure.

NO UPFRONT INVESTMENT

Building on-premise infrastructure can be slow and expensive. There is expensive hardware that you need to order, pay for, install, and configure—and all of this needs to happen long before you actually need it. With Cloud computing, you don’t have to spend time on these activities; instead you just pay for the resources you consume on a variable basis.

APPS NOT OPS

Cloud computing lets you shift resources away from data center investments and operations and move them to innovative new projects. Specifically, you can focus your scarce IT and engineering resources on projects that grow your business instead of focusing on IT infrastructure—which is important but hardly ever differentiates your business.

FLEXIBLE CAPACITY

Predicting how customers are going to adopt your new application is difficult, and it is hard to get right. Hence, when you make a capacity decision prior to deploying an application, you often either end up sitting on expensive idle resources or dealing with limited capacity. If you run out of capacity, then you are faced with a poor customer experience until you can acquire more resources. With Cloud computing, these problems go away. You provision the amount of resources you need. If you need more, you can easily scale up. If you don’t need them, just turn them off and stop paying.

SPEED AND AGILITY

With traditional infrastructure, it can take weeks to get a server procured, delivered, and running. These long timelines stifle innovation. With Cloud computing, you can provision resources as you need them. You can deploy hundreds or even thousands of servers in minutes, without talking to anyone. This self-service environment changes how quickly you can develop and deploy applications and allows your team to experiment more quickly and more frequently.